


Inexplicably Recovered Persons

by weaponizedsoul



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Aliens, Gen, Holistic Stuff viewed from a (very) outside perspective, The Backstage of Reality, if I got any police stuff wrong just assume it's cause aliens, in case that's a trigger for you, there's a bit where a character doesn't know where he is in the dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 15:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16478228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weaponizedsoul/pseuds/weaponizedsoul
Summary: If someone had been Missing for more than a week, they might be dead. If they had been Missing for more than a month, they were almost definitely dead. If they had been Missing for more than a year,they did not suddenly walk out of the bathroom at an office party, covered in water.Or: theotherway to interpret the phrase "alien abduction". Based on prompt 35, "Aliens". My partner tomhanksholisticdetectiveagency's story is here: https://tomhanksholisticdetectiveagency.tumblr.com/post/179627353131/dghda-spookfest-entry





	Inexplicably Recovered Persons

It was a truth universally acknowledged -- well, okay, universally within the Missing Persons Department -- that the longer a Person had been Missing, the less chance there was of them being Found. If they had been Missing for more than a week, they might be dead. If they had been Missing for more than a month, they were almost definitely dead. If they had been Missing for more than a year, _they did not suddenly walk out of the bathroom at an office party, covered in water._ Look, there was a reason they weren’t called “Found Persons”. But the detective who’d been in charge of the case a year and a half ago had been called in to interview the Mysteriously Found Person anyway.

The Completely Inexplicably Here Person was sitting on the very edge of his chair in the interview room, tapping his feet with pent-up energy. There was a wet towel around his neck. The detective sat down across from him and decided to start with the obvious question.

“Why are you all wet?”

The Astonishingly Not Dead Person stopped tapping his feet and shrugged sheepishly.

“Okay, this is going to make me sound nuts, but, uh…” He absentmindedly grabbed the towel and started toweling the back of his head. “A psychic alien threw a cup of water on me, and then I was in a toilet?”

The detective stared at him.

“How about we start from the beginning,” he said. “A year and a half ago you were a temp at Yax Heating and Cooling Systems’ _old_ office, until you… crawled behind a large office plant to find a pen and didn’t crawl back out.”

The Very Much Not Still Behind a Desk in an Abandoned Office Building Person’s eyes widened.

“That’s it! I knew there was something I--” He started rummaging around in his pockets, and finally pulled out a red pen. “Here it is! This is it, sorry, Geb probably doesn’t need it anymore but.”

He handed the pen to the detective, who took it out of habit.

“Well this… sure is a pen,” he said, “but you know I have no way of knowing-- this could be anyone’s pen!”

“Oh right, yeah sorry, I see it now.”

The Person reached across the table and grabbed the pen, a bit awkwardly since the detective was still holding on to it.

“Oh, you’re gonna keep--?”

“I mean, it’s probably evidence--”

“Oh totally, I see that, don’t know why I wanted it back actually, I mean it’s not my pen…”

The Person crossed his arms awkwardly on top of the table. The detective put the red pen in his shirt pocket, then took it out again because he realized he had another pen in there and he didn’t want them to get mixed up.

“Listen,” he said, gesturing vaguely with the pen, “I’ve had a long day, so how about you tell me your story about aliens and I won’t write any of it down because I won’t believe you and then we can both get on with our lives.”

The Quite Possibly Lying About How He Went Missing Person shrugged again.

“I mean, that’s fair. I kinda figured no one’d believe me. Okay, so Geb drops her pen and we’re all looking for it, and I someone’s like ‘it probably rolled behind the plant’ so I say I’ll check behind the plant, cause Geb is kinda almost my boss? So I go behind the plant and it’s really dark behind there, like really dark, like…” He flailed his hands around a bit before continuing. “Like space dark? Except I’ve never been in space but it’s supposed to be dark--”

The detective held up a hand.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “You said you were abducted by aliens, but you’ve never been in space?”

“I haven’t been in space! And I didn’t say I was abducted by aliens.”

The detective looked at the Person skeptically. The Person flailed some more.

“I don’t know what abducted me,” he said. “I mean, it looked like the same kind of thing? I mean I don’t know that it abducted me either--”

“Hold on, stop rambling.”

“But you’re the one who asked--”

The detective sighed.

“Just keep going, I want to get out of here as badly as you do. You were behind the plant, it got dark, and then…?”

“Well, I just thought it was kind of weird. But then there’s the pen, so I stand up like ‘I got it!’ but I’m not in the office anymore? I’m in this _place._ It’s all black except I can see myself so I figure, there’s some kind of light in here, and I look up and there’s this _big…_ light… thing.”

“A big light thing.”

“Yeah. It was like the sky, if the sky was blue, and also made of clouds that were also blue, but also black, and glowing? Sort of… lightning-y. And moving, it was definitely moving. So anyway, I look down, and there’s this alien there. It was sort of smiling, I think. And it had these eyes with like, this weird wavy red shape in them. And it looks at me, and then it just says ‘Oh cool, it worked! The universe says this is where you need to be, so just stay there I guess?’ and starts running away! Just _sprinting_ across this nothing place, like it didn’t disappear or anything, like I can _see it!”_

“Sounds rude. Look, if it was an alien, how could you understand what it was saying?” the detective said, he thought at least halfway reasonably.

“I mean, I don’t know, but--”

The detective clicked the red pen decisively, forgetting that it wasn’t his pen and he hadn’t taken his notepad out, so it had somewhat less of an effect than usual.

“That’s... what I thought,” he finished lamely.

“No, listen,” The Definite Tall Tale Telling Person insisted. “I think it was that place? No, hear me out! Because I could understand the other alien too, the psychic one I told you about, but only while we were in there. Because she turned up, right in front of the other one, the one who was running away, and -- I think they had a fight about something? But anyway -- she said we were in this place that was outside of reality or something? And she said she had a vision about me and she thought I should come with her to her planet and she could figure out how to get me back--”

The detective set the pen down on the table with a satisfying tap.

“I’ve lost my patience for this.”

“No, listen--”

“No, _you_ listen. Mysterious aliens who live in a -- a weird shapeless dimension where reality doesn’t work like usual and are connected to the universe and don’t understand Ulnar interaction -- it’s straight out of a sci-fi show, you don’t need to tell me you made all this up, it’s obvious. Look, I can’t charge you with anything, it seems like you believe what you’re saying, your family is waiting outside, why don’t you just go?”

The Not Missing Anymore Person stood up hesitantly. He reached for the pen that was still sitting on the table, but the detective snatched it back and put it in his coat pocket. The Found Person backed away.

“Oh, you still want--”

The detective stood up.

_“I’m keeping the pen!”_

“Okay. That’s fair.”

The Found Person skittered out of the room and closed the door, accidentally flicking the light switch with his elbow on the way out and leaving the detective alone in the dark. The detective sighed loudly and stood there for a second collecting himself, before going to turn the lights back on. He took a few steps forward, his arms stretched out in front of him. The light switch seemed very far away. A few more steps. The interview room was definitely not this big. A few more steps. He considered the possibility that the station was playing a prank on him -- they had told the Found Person to feed him that story and then turn the lights off, then quickly turned the lights in the rest of the station off too, and opened the door so the detective would walk out into the hall. After a few more steps he dismissed that theory. The hall wasn’t this long, and the station wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about something like this. He would have been able to hear them sneaking around, laughing at him.

Finally, the detective looked up.

It did look like the sky, covered in a bank of storm clouds, or like thousands of glowing maps all overlapping each other, or like a futuristic electrical circuit. Oh, and moving. It was _definitely_ moving. Just then, someone coughed.

The detective looked down from the… okay, the big light thing, and saw a creature like the one the Found Person described. Well, it had the same eyes, with the red wavy shape in them. But it didn’t look quite as… casual as the Found Person had made it out to be. The detective couldn’t put his finger on it, especially since this was an alien, which made its face kind of hard to read, but it didn’t seem like the type of person that would say “oh cool”.

In fact, what it said was: “None of that was supposed to happen. _GIVE US THE PEN.”_


End file.
